Cloudburst: An Anthology of Hispanic Canadian Short Stories

Look into Cloudburst: The Central Themes

15 Reading the stories in this anthology is a gratifying experience due to both the strength and grace of the anecdotes and tribulations they contain and to how much they confirm the health of Hispanic Canadian literature (though there are many paths still to explore). Our methodology for choosing the stories was to post an open yet focused call for submissions on Internet forums with audiences interested in cultural activities. The characteristics of the announcement were clear: we were interested in authors who produced their work in Canada and had already published some of their writing. The response was immediate, or almost: the first author responded within a day. By the deadline for submissions, we found ourselves with a number of writers that surpassed our expectations . We then turned to the task of selecting the authors and the texts for this collection according to the announced criteria. We should emphasize that this overview is not intended to be a diagnosis of the state of short story production in Spanish in Canada, although it might serve as such. Instead, it attempts to emphasize the general lines of the stories it contains. Some of the authors have a vast literary production that has already diverged onto diverse paths. We have only A Look into Cloudburst: The Central Themes Cloudburst 16 included a few stories out of their total production. It is probable, as tends to happen in anthologies, that important names are missing. In short, this book isn’t all there is, nor are we all in it. Yet it is true that we can trace the routes along which our literature strolls and interacts through a reading of the stories’ thematic elements and the dynamics of their approach. In this way, Cloudburst has been able to trace diverse aspects of deep political commitment. These concerns sometimes appear directly, and at other times less so. They may be visible in the conflicts of the era in which dictatorships took the institutions of some Latin American nations by storm, but they may also take shape in a post-ideological framework in which all that’s left are empty subjects from the public service, immersed in the various conflicts that have survived them (Creimer, J. Etcheverry, Reimers, Rodríguez, Rozotto, Salinas, Tobar, Torres-Recinos). Some stories recall one moment or another with such technical skill that they reach their climax without the reader realizing, till the last moment, that he or she is dealing with a political drama. In this anthology, political violence arises from the concrete presence of facts that define the story as almost an intimate reflection in which, at the time of narration, the diegesis is not yet marked by violence, but rather, in some cases, by the elaboration of memories. The migrations and phenomena generated by violence are also an important thematic focus in this collection, especially in the stories that deal with the process of settling down in a new place (Junge-Hammersley, Molina Lora, Quintanilla, Reimers, Rodríguez, Rozotto, Salinas, Saravia). In turn, the characters’ interaction with these questions references broad migratory moments that fall into three categories, which may ormaynotconvergeinanygivenstory.First,thereistheattempt to insert the protagonist into the new culture, which emerges as a complex process with considerations and vicissitudes thatarere-elaboratedinthetext.Second,theexactmomentthat the goal is reached and the character begins to enjoy the new national identity almost as if it were his or her own—which A Look into Cloudburst 17 perhaps it is, within the current space of intercultural appropriations —often ends up being the central concern of the story. Yet the migrant subject doesn’t appear as such, but rather as a citizen, one more inhabitant whose conflicts end up being displaced by other dynamics. That is, while some authors focus on traces of the Ulysses Syndrome, including, of course, the nostalgic view of the paradise from which the subject has been displaced, others focus on the daily exercise of living the new cultural life from a well-defined position of migratory identity. This change of view defines the two first points, one viewpoint that begins with the protagonist’s present conflict and leads us to his or her private paradise, and the other that perhaps begins at the present but always serves as a projection in which the original references disappear, just as they do in the case of someone who arrives from a place of conflict. Third, there is...